Knighthood and Chivalry

No substantial change since September 1996.

Terminology

The terms are often confused, and often needlessly distinguished. The
term knighthood comes from the English word knight (from Old English
cniht, boy, servant, cf. German Knecht) while chivalry comes from
the French chevalerie, from chevalier or knight (Low Latin
caballus for horse). In modern English, chivalry means the ideals,
virtues, or characteristics of knights. The phrases "orders of chivalry"
and "orders of knighthood" are essentially synonymous.

The German translation for "knight" is Ritter (literally,
rider). The Latin term in the Middle Ages was miles, since a knight
was by definition a professional soldier. In modern times, the Classical
Latin term eques was preferred.

History

The Emergence of knights

Succintly, a knight was a professional soldier. The old "citizens'
armies" of Antiquity had been replaced by professional armies. This
trend was reinforced by the appearance in the 8th century of the stirrup,
which made mounted men much more powerful and turned cavalry into the most
important element of medieval armies. But being a mounted soldier was expensive,
since it required enough income to buy and sustain a horse and the equipment
(armor, weapons) to go with it. Thus, those who were too poor to provide
this service became mere peasants, attached to the land.

In feudal society as it emerged in the 10th century, everyone held land
from someone else in exchange for goods or services of some kind. Men who
were not free provided a portion of their crops and labor services. Men
who were free provided military service, either personally or (if they
were rich enough) using others' services. Thus, a man who held his estate
in knight's fee owed service as a knight to his lord. A more sizeable vassal,
when called by his liege, would summon his knights and form a contingent
in his liege's army.

The Development of Knighthood

Knighthood was originally a professional association. It included those
men who could afford to make and maintain the heavy capital investment
required by mounted warfare (horse and armor). It emerges in the 11th century,
and its members are nobles (members of the great land-owning families)
as well as small land-holders, free men, craftsmen, etc (in Spain, caballeros
villanos were common until the 14th c.). It must be understood that,
even in the feudal era, the boundaries of knighthood were quite fluid.
Anyone who, by luck or effort, managed to obtain the training and equipment
to be a knight, could eventually enter that class. In Flanders, there is
a famous case of a family of servile (i.e., unfree) origin who entered
into knighthood and became castellans of ??? in the 12th c.

In the course of the 12th century, a social and ethical dimension is
added to this professional aspect. The strong influence of Cluny monks,
who try to give an ethos to savage warfare, leads to the definition of
the true miles Christi, a soldier who follows a certain code of
behavior, which we now call chivalric. Starting in the second half of the
12th century, literature (gests and Arthurian romances) also provides a
model for the knightly community, as well as a means of glorifying it.

Knighthood and Nobility

Thus, knights were not necessarily nobles, nor were nobles necessarily
knights. The noble class and the knightly class slowly came to merge from
the late 12th century onward. Nobles become knights with increasing frequency.
The French prince (future king Louis VI) was knighted without the knowledge
of his father who remains distrustful of a rather heterogeneous professional
class, but thereafter every French king is knighted (Favier 1993). Conversely,
heredity enters the knightly class in the 13th century. The son of a knight
is automatically a squire, thus making him eligible for knighthood on the
basis of his ancestry; at the same time, knighthood is more and more restricted
to descendants of knights by various legal restrictions imposed over the
course of the 13th century. In the late 13th century, a decision of the
Parliament in Paris forbade the count of Artois from making unfree men
into knights without the king's consent; interesting to note, the two men
who had been so knighted were allowed to remain knights subject to the
payment of a fine. This marked both the closure of the knightly class as
well as the beginnings of a new form of access, by purchase.

In England, the evolution was different: those who held land in
knight's fee but did not wish to take up the profession could pay a tax.
Knighthood did not become a hereditary class in England, and instead the
knightly class (those eligible to be knights) became the nucleus of
the gentry.

The End of Knighthood

As a military institution, knighthood was on the wane from the late
13th century on. The end of feudal society meant that sovereigns gained
a monopoly on war-making, and the old form of military service owed to
one's immediate lord became obsolete. Kings still summoned their knights
for wars, but increasingly they turned to other sources of manpower, namely
mercenaries whose use became common in the 14th century. The war preparations
of Henry V of England, which are well-documented, show how the king formed
an army: he signed dozens of contracts (or indentures) with individuals
who pledged to provide a specified number of men-at-arms and archers (usually
3 archers for each man-at-arm) at muster time.

The development of gunpowder and increasingly more powerful archery
meant that the use of massive cavalry charges to break enemy lines and
carry swift victory could not be relied upon, and the dominance of cavalry
came to an end. If any battle summed up this change, it was the battle
of Agincourt in 1415. The charging French knights, compressed by the terrain
and the English arrows into a fragmented and ever constricted line of attack,
reached the English line without any room to maneuver, and it only took
a few fallen horses to prevent all other knights from moving in any direction.
Thus, in half-an-hour the battle was decided, and thousands of French knights
lay prisoners. The fear of a second attack prompted the English to kill
them on the spot, and the French nobility was horribly decimated in a single
day. The French learned their lesson; Charles VII, who finally expelled
the English, formed the first standing, professional army in Europe.

The chivalric ideals continued to live on, perhaps precisely because
the reality of knighthood had disappeared, and a free rein was given to
romanticizing. The French king François Ier insisted on being knighted
on the battlefield of his first victory at Marignano in 1515. Tournaments,
pas d'armes were favorite entertainment at the French court of the 16th
century. More and more elaborate suits of armor were forged for pure display,
in increasingly baroque imitations of earlier models. Ariosto's poetic
retelling of the crusades popularized the figures of Orlando and Ruggiero
and extended the knightly myth for another 200 years. In the 19th century,
when no one read Ariosto anymore, Sir Walter Scott and Romanticism took
up the cause.

Orders of Knighthood

The origins of orders of knighthood are in the Crusades. In the Latin
Orient, a new institution emerged, in which knights (professional soldiers)
associated themselves under a strict, quasi-monastic rule of life, for
the purpose of protecting pilgrims and defending Christian conquests in
the Holy Land. In the 14th century, just as the original military-monastic
orders were searching for a new mission after the loss of the Holy Land,
kings began creating orders of their own, modelled in part on these original
orders, but with a different purpose, to bind their nobility to themselves.
Still later, in the late 16th century, these monarchical orders were imitated
in form by the new orders of merit which became common throughout Europe.

Because each institution tried to use the prestige of the previous one
by imitating it, the term "order of knighthood" has been passed
on and is now used for modern awards and decorations which are neither
orders nor composed of knights. In modern society, only a very few orders
survive from the times of the Crusades, and most "orders of knighthood"
awarded by sovereigns or governments (such as the English Garter or the
Spanish Golden Fleece) are, in spite of their historical connection, awards
of merit.

Heraldry and Knighthood

The relations between heraldry, nobility and knighthood are often completely
misunderstood. Briefly stated, heraldry appeared in the landed aristocracy
and quickly spread to the knightly class in the 12th century, at a time
when knighthood and nobility remain very distinct classes. Over the course
of the 13th century, knighthood and nobility came to merge, just as heraldry
spread far beyond either class to be used by all classes of society. Thus,
heraldry is not particularly linked to nobility, although the most easily
documented uses of heraldry are among nobles, simply because nobles were
the elite.

The initial development of heraldry certainly owes a lot to the practices
of the knightly class, in particular the growing fashion of tournaments,
which became more and more popular from the 13th century, just as knighthood
as a military institution was on the wane. Tournaments were the occasion
to display coats of arms, and heralds, who were originally a specialized
group of minstrels, became responsible for identifying and cataloguing
the arms of participants. Their knowledge of coats of arms also helped
them identify fighters in battle and dead on the battlefield, and for this
reason heralds became associated with battles, truces, declarations of
war, in an official capacity.